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Sony BMG Sued For Using Pirated Software
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Mar 30, 2008 03:51 PM
from the turnabout-is-sweet dept.
from the turnabout-is-sweet dept.
An anonymous reader sends us to ZeroPaid, which seems to be the only site in English to have picked up a story out of France involving Sony and piracy. Except this time the shoe is on the other foot. The small software company PointDev learned that Sony BMG was using a pirated license for one of its system administration tools. PointDev got bailiffs to raid a Sony property and they found pirated software on four servers. The source article (link is to a Google translation of French original) quotes PointDev's spokesman claiming that the BSA believes 47% of software used in corporations to be illegal — whether he is referring to Sony in particular is not clear in the translation.
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Firehose:Sony BMG sued for using pirated software by Anonymous Coward
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Makes You Wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Makes You Wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, so now they can deny they installed anything and just blame, um, Sony.
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Lost in translation... (Score:5, Funny)
Why it does not happen more often? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am surprised that this does not occur more than it does in large businesses like Sony, the scale of the company increases the number of opportunities for this to occur. Also there are more people that have guilty knowledge that something like this occurred. It would only take one of these people to become disgruntled and rat out their employer( for a finder's fee of course).
Re:Why it does not happen more often? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why it does not happen more often? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only 'haha'? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only 'haha'? (Score:5, Funny)
But only if you believe that Sony BMG was intelligently designed.
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What will they charge per pirated copy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What will they charge per pirated copy? (Score:5, Interesting)
That makes no sense. In P2P situations, the idea is that the person has shared each song with lots of people who would otherwise have bought it. Nobody is accusing Sony of putting this software on a P2P network, so where would the idea of "theoretical lost sales" come from? The number of lost sales is known, it's the number of installations Sony were using.
I'm all for holding Sony to their own standards, but let's not just invent crazy behaviour and pretend it's the same thing.
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Copyvio happen all the time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some cynical emails by me later and they eventually removed the content (they properly didn't want to include the GFDL into their propaganda material, as it would be quite contrary to all the pro-copyright stuff). This shows us: even those who try to make us believe copyright is important don't really care much about it when _they_ want to copy something.
47% is global, not for Sony (Score:5, Informative)
I'm french so I can provide a more accurate translation:
According to the Business Software Alliance, an organization representing the major software companies, 47% of the software used by businesses in France is used illegally.
So 47% is the global number for french businesses, not limited to Sony.
I still wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
It's good to see Sony pay though. I hope this gets mainstream news coverage - I really can't stand those Hippocr... ah, excuse me, my choleric side is breaking through again...
Sue the bastards!
Use the RIAA's math to figure damages (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony needs to put up or shut up.
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, auditing software tends to have the most obscure licensing terms and is frequently next to useless anyway - either because it only goes by what's in the registry for "Add/Remove Programs" (so some dodgy copy of an application which was hacked around and no longer appears in "Add/Remove Programs" won't be caught) or it just gives you a list of every
It is for all practical purposes impossible to put hand-on-heart and say "I can guarantee that we're not using a single piece of pirated software" in any significantly sized business today. About the best you can do is say "I'm pretty sure we're not, however if you can provide evidence that I'm wrong I will be happy to look at resolving the issue - either by using an alternative product or buying whatever it is that we're missing".
I would gladly migrate the entire enterprise over to Free (either speech or beer) software tomorrow for every single business need - it would eliminate that worry at a stroke - but this is the real world and half-decent Free accounting and payroll applications are pretty thin on the ground.
My guess is that someone less than honest installed the application in the past with a pirated key and left the company. Their successor ran into trouble with the application and did the sensible thing - called the vendor.
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
That may be true, but it's never the "known knowns" that get you in trouble.
The question for your bosses, on the other hand, is there commercial software about which they have no knowledge that isn't properly licensed? Apparently there is. And that fact reflects badly on the public image of a company, among other things, even if the transgression occurred in someone else's division.
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked at it rather suspiciously and asked her for the license documentation. She handed me a hand written license key on note paper.
I asked her where she got the CD and I gave this guy a call. He was a tech at the corporate offices on the left coast. I asked him about it and asked how many licenses we had. (I was thinking they might have a corporate license and just needed to know who had the app installed)
He replied that the company had 5 licenses. I asked him how many systems it was installed on. "Umm 50 here I think."
Yeah, right. I reminded him that it was not a good idea to install apps without a license. He agreed, but was ordered to do it by the head of the department that uses this thing.
(Management by threat is the standard with this company)
Knowing where this was going I thanked him, told my supervisor, (Who almost had kittens when I filled him in), broke the CD in front of him and another witness and then told the user that the app wasn't going on her system.
Moving forward, I have second hand information that this problem was reported up the line twice to the VP who managed my org. I personally told him that we had at least 35 illegal copies, (installed by the users themselves when we refused to do it), and that considering the numbers of DBA's and developers in the company, we might be out of compliance to the tune of 1-2 million dollars.
His exact words were:
"I don't want to hear about this. If I hear about this officially, then I'll have to do something about it."
This bozo was dumb enough to say that to me in front of witnesses.
My local group continued refusing to install this thing and kept extensive documentation, (CYA type), regarding this.
Shortly before I left a panicked data call from the CIO came down asking for the number of installs at our site. I had the number of course, but I like to think that someone blew the whistle on them.
Shortly after I left, both the VP I reported to and the CIO either wanted to "Spend more time with their families, or seek new alternatives elsewhere".
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on the exact definition of "commercial software" you happen to be be using then you could be "pirating" quite a bit of software. Just because software is not "commercial" does not mean that it is exempt from copyright.
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Informative)
I can count on one finger the organizations I've worked for where shareware tools like WinZip were actually properly licensed. At one shop I worked at, I actually had the CFO (who also functioned as the CIO/CTO) say, in these exact words, "oh, nobody actually enforces that WinZip license.. you think the BSA is gonna come in here and bust our nuts over 100 unlicensed copies of WinZip? Get real!".
Three months after I left this company, the BSA came in, did a "software audit", and indeed busted their nuts over 100 unlicensed copies of WinZip (along with other licensing violations).
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it was probably just a "rogue admin", maybe it was easier to get it pirated than to go through the proper channels, or maybe it was deemed too expensive for what it was offering. In any case it was willful infrigement and I think Sony BMG should pay 150.000 x the price of the software for each violation. Note that the number is not selected randomly - it is the equivalent of the cases where Sony BMG is suing.
I should note that the software in question even offered a 30-day evaluation.
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Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Either pirating other people's work (software, mp3 etc) is right or wrong. If it's right, then why are you laughing at this, according to half of the
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Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
There is underway currently the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, and it's going from workers to the very rich. Sort of socialism in reverse, and the result will be that the world will become a very unpleasant place in which to live for most of us.
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yes, slashdot comments are sometimes inconsistent (Score:5, Funny)
It almost seems as if they were written by different people.
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